`Red flags all over the place': Warning signs look obvious now

Miami Herald Online ^ | Thursday, September 27, 2001 | LENNY SAVINO

[InvisibleChurch]

``Somehow, it fell between the cracks,''

Things don't fall between cracks, they fall through cracks. A minor point.

Sure the red flags were up, but so were so many others raised by the left, such as killer suvs, cigarettes, accusations of republicans wanting to poison the air and kill children and grandpeople, result-free soccer leagues, and all sorts of nonsense... We have/had several congressmen who are poll driven and unless the matter of terrorist action upon the US was on the vote-radar then little would have been done about it. The left deserves an amount of blame for this mess, supporting a president who put himself above all others among other things. It's no wonder we didn't see it coming.

[chit*chat]

I just e-mailed O'Reilly and asked him if he could contact this person and interview him. Give it the in-depth look that it deserves. Perhaps he will mention it on his show, or better yet, have that person as a guest. c*c

[Donna Lee Nardo]

Oh you are a newbie! Perhaps a "liberal demoncrat" too! Oh gosh, I just used 2 curse words in a row, excusez moi, s'il vous plait.

[Xenalyte]

Yogi Berra Story starring GWB

member since September 27th, 2001

[jeremiah]

Probably studying Vince Foster conspiracy theories, or combing nightclubs for Clinton sexcapades.

I do believe you have your history wrong, the Congress ran from both the Foster mystery, and flinched badly when presented with BillyJeffs peccadillos. They want(ed) no part of sex stories, it uncovered their own. On the other hand, we have the Clinton administration to thank for the lack of oversight of the dangers of terrorism, and the sorry shape of the military. When he came into office, our boys could fight two wars simultaneously, now they are struggling to get up to snuff, to fight one.

[TLBSHOW]

Where were you when the liberal bias media lied about x42 being a real American when in fact he is a socialist.

All the Clinton lies were there to see. Open your eyes sonny!

[jeremiah]

I love your "handle", Yogi was also very intelligent, fractured the English language hilariously, and was the winningest catcher of our time. BTW, catcher is the hardest position on the team, and he calls all of the shots.

[wingnuts'nbolts]

Has everone forgotten the antisemeticism alive and well in the former soviet union? Or that thousands of Russian Jews migrated to Israel out of fear for their lives?

[discostu]

Common, give the guys a break. There's 280 million people in this country, and God only knows how many square miles. Some foreign intel agency says "Bin Laden is planning a major attack soon, but we don't know what he's going to attack, how he's going to attack or when the attack will take place"; and the CIA is supposed to use that "information" to stop the attack on the 11th. There need to be nouns for the info to be useful. Just the word "planes" would have given them something to go on, but without that all they're telling the CIA is stuff they already assume. Operational theory is that the bad guy is going to do something somewhere sometime probably soon.

Fact is our intelligence organizations stop dozens of attacks a year. Some are bound to get through. Instead of second guessing try supporting them. These guys have a really tough job to do. They pick of bits and pieces of information from all over the world and have to try to figure out what's going on. There's hundred of various terrorist organizations they're monitoring, each of which is working on multiple plots. Our intel guys have to match the info with the group and the plot and try to figure out who wants to make what go boom, how and when. To understand intel analysis do this: buy 100 puzzles, make sure they are all the same type of scenes but different scenes, make sure they're all at least 500 pieces, now take a fist full of pieces out of each box throw them on the floor, burn the boxes and all the remaining pieces, now take that pile of random fist fulls and tell me what each puzzle is a picture of. That's what these guys get to work with, random bits of information where step one is figuring out which "picture" it goes to, then what the picture means, and they have brutal deadlines.

We should be thanking these guys, we should thank them for their miraculous success rate. It's truly amazing how many of these things they stop.

[maestro]

Their 'pattern' has been office administrations buildings with multi-national workers working. (via direct sudden access)
IMHO

[DreamWeaver]

What I would like to know is the timeline for the Clinton's restrictions on the CIA and also Torcelli's legislation as it related to the sucessful breaking up of this ring by our law enforcement. If their restrictions were put in AFTER this .... I can't even type what I feel should happen!

Good point to question, but do you really expect an answer ? Sorry to say, let's not hold our breath waiting for one.

[discostu]

That's been their pattern on US soil. But that's thousands of buildings, mostly on the coasts, though some in the heartland. And there's still the how. Even if we knew for sure WTC was the target, nobody was expecting this how. WE could have ringed both towers with CIA and FBI agents 24-7 and not been able to do a damn thing (except lose a lot of CIA and FBI agents). This was a unique terrorist attack in many ways, one of which is that it started and ended in different places. Even if somehow the guys figure out that Bin Laden is going to hijack planes and run them into the WTC who'd a thunk they'd hijack planes from Logan?! JFK and LaGuardia would be the logical choices, maybe Newark, but I (were I to be in charge) wouldn't spread the alert zone more than 100 miles away from New York, it just wouldn't make sense.

[timestax]

NO DOUBT ABOUT IT,RED FLAGS ALL OVER THE PLACE!

[timestax]

With a proper warning, the one terrorists would not have gatten a seat in that jumpseat.

[timestax]

gotten, or received.

[discostu]

Well yeah, with a proper warning they would have been arrested at the gate. The trick is constructing that proper warning. For that you need who (not the mastermind "who" either, but the actual grunt worker "who"), where and when.

I've heard a lot of stuff in the last two weeks about X telling the CIA or FBI this that or the other thing. And while, after the fact, they all plainly related to this plot I have yet to see anything that would have given enough info about this plot BEFORE the fact to allow anyone to stop it. It's the old "5 W's" of journalism (who, what, where, when, why and how), obviously the CTC could give a damn about why, but if you can't give them at least two of the other four (and again, who is the workers not the mastermind) you can't expect them to stop anything. And none of these supposed tips even included one of the W's.

[mad_as_he$$]

The simple fact of the matter is that the Federal government has failed big time in its (one of the few) requirements to protect it's citizens. This is a major breach of trust with the American people. THEY DC BUREAUCRATS HAVE LET THEIR PETTY INFIGHTING GET 7,000 AMERICANS KILLED - THIS IS UNACCEPTABLE. INSTEAD OF KISSING CIA'S ASS W SHOULD OF BEEN LOBBING OFF HEADS

[SuziQ]

Hindsight is always 20/20. I don't care how many 'warnings', specific or otherwise the FBI or CIA had prior to 9/11. This is a huge country, and people have the ability to travel all over unhindered. If someone is using several aliases, it would be difficult to track them down.

I don't fault the CIA or FBI for what happenend PRIOR to 9/11, but I WOULD fault them if they haven't learned their lessons by now. Racial or ethnic profiling notwithstanding, we're going to have to be much more scrupulous about who we let into this country.

I read an article in our local paper yesterday about how student visas are being limited and that those who are here on them will be watched more closely. And if they drop out of school, they WILL be deported.

It is sad that it took an evil of such a magnitude to galvanize folks, but it is better late than never.

[mommadooo3]

Red flags...ones that were there for years....doesn't God cause ears and eyes to REMAIN stopped?

Just a question, of no particular relevance or importance. But what DOES God do with those who have spoke out against all the sins and the undermining of the country? It seems that all the protests, marches, Right-to-life, etc have amounted to nothing more than spinning our wheels.

[Magician]

The warning given to the CIA by the Israelis was of the greatest seriousness. They sent a delegation of the top Mossad people to talk directly with the CIA personnel. They gave the time frame (next few weeks), the size of the attack (200 agents involved), and which organization (affiliated with bin Laden) was going to pull it off.

Considering that the CIA already had a written outline of the attack, acquired when Ramsi Yussef and his partner were arrested, and already had under suspicion some of the bin Laden people involved, you would wonder why they didn't round up the "usual suspects" and sweat something out of them as to what was going to happen.

Do the Mossad and French intelligence have to come over here themselves and round up and question the known members of the bin Laden organization for us?